“So that it may look like a silly man breaking up a marriage, but it is really more like adult education?” Suzanne examined her fingernails. “I can’t imagine you going off with somebody. What was she like?”
“That doesn’t matter. I didn’t go off with her, can’t you see that’s the point I’m trying to make? I wanted to, I meant to, but in the end I couldn’t, because of the responsibilities I already had. I made her promises; in fact, the first time we met…it was a time when, looking back now, I feel that more or less I was out of my mind.”
“So you got back in your mind and forgot all about her?”
“Oh no. It’s not as easy as that.”
“Didn’t you know what you wanted?”
“I wanted a new life. But in the end, you see, I preferred the life I had. My nerve failed. It’s often that way.”
“For you, perhaps. I expect it was just money really.”
“I wish,” he said, “you would not speak so disrespectfully of money.”
“But how could you have supported another wife, and all of us?”
“Oh, you see the difficulty! Men do so seldom leave their wives.”
“It happens every day.”
“It happens not so often as you think.”
“But my case is quite different.”
“So you say. But you don’t know what might happen, you don’t know what might pull him back to her. It was Claire that pulled me back. Your mother got pregnant. You might think that if I could contemplate leaving a woman with three young children, then I could leave her with four; but as soon as she told me, I thought of the baby, the innocent baby who couldn’t possibly be blamed for any of it. And then it seemed a horrible thing—” Colin stopped. He saw that he was doing himself no good.
“So it was the baby that decided it.” She smiled. His confession, which had been so difficult to make, had not disturbed her at all. It had not helped her; she was beyond help, simply impervious.
“I suppose what it shows,” he said, pricked into a final effort, “is how unpredictable human emotions are. I thought that my marriage was over. But here I am.”
“Yes, here you are. But people want children: you can predict that. He’s always wanted children, and Isabel has never been able to have any.”
“Who?” Colin said.
“That’s the name of his wife. Isabel.”
He felt a superstitious shudder. It was as if she had taken the name straight out of his brain.
“This woman, who is she? What’s her maiden name?”
“How should I know?”
How dreadful, he thought, what a ghastly coincidence that they should have the same name; his Isabel, and this unknown woman so soon to be tricked and left by the spry, the young, the fertile. “Poor woman,” he said.
“Poor nothing. She’s a prize neurotic. She’s made his life a misery.”
“There’s no married man,” he said angrily, “who has an affair, who doesn’t tell the girl that his wife makes his life a misery. I did it, about your mother.”
“Well, that’s true, isn’t it? She does.”
“That’s beside the point. Oh, I don’t know.” Colin ran his hand through his hair. “Perhaps I was wrong to say that human emotions are unpredictable. Predictable is just what they are, from where I stand. If there’s one thing you can rely on, Suzanne, it’s the perfidy and cowardice of married men. And if there’s one thing you can’t rely on, it’s contraceptives.”
“Oh, we didn’t use contraceptives,” Suzanne said. “It’s unnatural and unnecessary. I read a book about it. People should go back to simpler methods. Like withdrawal.”
Colin could not believe what he had heard. “Who is this imbecile?” he demanded. “Who is he, this moron you’ve got entangled with? What’s his name? What does he do for a living?”
“His name’s Jim Ryan,” she said, stony-faced. “You probably haven’t met him yet. He’s your new assistant bank manager.”
When Miss Anaemia came downstairs, she found Mr. Kowalski kneeling on the floor in the hall, his ear pressed to the knob of the kitchen door. “New doorknobs,” she said brightly. “Get them on the market, did you? Or are they another mystery?”
Mr. Kowalski got to his feet with a groan. “Man rings the telephone,” he told her. “I answer, says ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ Is a code.”
“Could be,” the girl said. “Or a wrong number. Anyway, I was telling you, this woman came. She accused me of having relations with a man.”
“Dirty minds,” Mr. K. said. He touched her elbow in a commiserating way. Her helplessness moved him. “Poor girl. I think I have seen you long ago. In Warsaw.”
“I’ve never been east of Thanet Island.”
“I spoke metaphorically,” Mr. K. said.
“It must have been my double. I’ve got a double, you know. I must have, because someone stopped me in the street once and said, ‘How’s your Auntie Frieda?’ It was embarrassing. Anyway, this woman, she wanted to inspect the bedsheets. I told her she could if she liked. On the way out she pretended she’d forgotten which was the door.
